Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/40

 wire framework is to the climbing plant. Or one might compare them to the body of a piece of fireworks; it needed his genius to set fire to them, but this fire was magnificently controlled, and not a spark was wasted. Moreover the value of this combination of method and active genius finds its proof in the result—Grétry was the most fertile of French melodists.

It is this melodic abundance which, in the absence of performances on the stage, lends great charm to the continuous reading of Grétry's best works. It is the welling up of a fresh spring, constantly renewed, and widely spread. Music has had more powerful creators, capable it may be granted of striking stronger blows. But there has never been one who conveyed so strongly the impression of unfailing inspiration. I have spoken of his music having breadth—for we are not to suppose that because Grétry was a composer of comic opera (the first of our composers of comic opera) his inspiration moves in a confined sphere. I will not base the claim for breadth on his efforts in musical tragedy, to which he brought, in spite of much elegance and feeling, insufficient strength. But comic opera as he handles it, if it is often the Italian opéra-bouffe adapted to French tastes, is often also Middle Comedy, that is to say, the form which lends itself to the greatest variety of sentiments and tones, the form of which Molière is thinking in his famous comparison of Tragedy and Comedy (Critique de l'Ecole des Femmes)—"When you depict heroes," he makes Dorante say, you have a free hand: they are fancy portraits in which one looks for no points of resemblance, and you have only